2015-05-07

G+ Collections: Its Killer Feature Is Not What You Think

When Google+ Collections were announced a few days ago, I pretty much could hardly contain the resounding "meh" with which I greeted it. Wohoo for grouping posts by topic as "Collections".

But when playing around with them recently, I realized that this enables the killer feature I've wanted on social media platforms such as G+ and Facebook for years! Finally, there is hope that I might one day be able to filter out much of the noise I do not care about from those I do want to follow. Allow me to briefly explain...

Perhaps you're following me, but not interested in my posts about Milwaukee, dislike my Politics, or could give a rat's posterior about what's happening in Information Technology. Well guess what — you no longer have to be subjected to these in your feed!

And it's ridiculously simple to implement.

In my case, for example, you would visit my Collections page (obviously still a work in progress), and click Following/Follow to change your preference for each. And while this removes these topics from your feed, the beauty of this is that the posts will still be visible to you should you visit my page directly.

Of course, this does depend on those you follow to create and utilize Collections. But I'm optimistic that this will see wider adoption as words spreads about the benefits!